This 3D-Printed 35mm Movie Camera Is an Absolute Marvel of DIY Design and Engineering

It's obvious that shooting on film is expensive, and that's one of the reasons why big-budget movie and TV productions have switched to using digital cameras. The 35mm cameras that dominated Hollywood for years, but Yuta Ikeya found a way to make them more affordable by designing and 3D printing a film camera from scratch.

The high-end digital film cameras commonly used in the industry today are not cheap, but they eliminate the costs of film stock and the extra steps of having footage developed and then digitized so it can be graded, processed, and edited in post-production. There is a certain aesthetic to shooting on film that digital can't match yet, which is why amateur filmmakers with smaller budgets will shoot on 8mm or 16mm film instead of 35mm, but the savings come at the cost of a reduced resolution.

In what has to be one of the most technically impressive attempts at budget-conscious guerilla filmmaking we have seen, Yuta Ikeya designed, modeled, and 3D-printed most of the parts needed to assemble a custom 35mm film camera. The parts that didn't come from a 3D printer include a single DC motor to drive all the motorized mechanisms inside, a power source, and a mirror to split the incoming light so the shooter.

The motion picture industry uses more expensive stocks than the C-41 based photographic 35mm film that Ikeya chose to shoot on. The test footage was captured using two rolls of Ilford HP5+ film which were loaded into a custom 3D-printed film cartridge and inserted into the camera.

Light leak and gate weave are issues that the captured footage suffers from. Without knowing where the footage came from, it would be easy to dismiss it as being overly artistic, but the fact that it was captured by a 3D-printed film camera leaves us incredibly impressed with what Ikeya has achieved. The obvious room for improvement, which is why we are hoping that the 3D-printing community can contribute ways to upgrade its performance and improve the captured results.